Claptrap's Adventure!
by Hardman 5509
Summary: With only a little over two weeks left to live, Claptrap must traverse Pandora and find a way of stopping a mastermind who has captured not only the Vault Hunters, but all of the helpful NPCs! It's his time to shine...but regardless Pandora is screwed. Rated T for language, bloody fights, sexual content, and to prevent children from playing with Claptrap.
1. The Calling

The people of Sanctuary had no need for a mailman, seeing how small their flying city was and the utility of the ECHOnet. But Claptrap felt the need to be useful in some way, so he (As he believed to be referred to.) took upon himself to deliver the fine people their physical mail, regardless of weather (Seeing how Sanctuary tended to hang above the clouds, that wasn't a issue.) regardless of attacks by bandits or evil corporations (His cloaking device still worked, much to the surprise of about everyone.) and regardless of his own personal issues. (At this point, a Gunzerker with a Nukem and a Maggie couldn't keep him down for long.)

Having somehow gained a proper cap and satchel, Claptrap went about his usual route to deliver all the important mail to everyone in the city. First came the nameless NPCs, who got bits and pieces and various junk mail so they could complain about it as a main character passed by them. Avoiding a few stray pistol shots from the drunk and the sober hecklers, he made his way towards Scooter's Garage to drop off his new wrenches. Either for fixing cars, repairing the many and complex machines that kept Sanctuary afloat, or for building that wifedroid he had been muttering about for a while.

"One order of Hyerflux AO55 12 Count!" Claptrap announced as he threw the package into Scooter's lap, smashing against his manhood. Scooter fell out of his chair and onto the floor, launching the box of the heavy-duty tools into his face. As he lay there groaning in pain, he expected some stupid kid to come by and insult him for some reason. Not today though; Tommy didn't memorize his vocabulary sheet and was grounded.

Next came a cooler for one Doctor Zed, obviously stuffed with illegal organs. Claptrap wanted to take a peek inside and see if he could recognize the organ and who it belonged to…but a mailman's duty is to deliver and not ruin the surprise! A mailman is not allowed to open up packages and look at the contents, not even if it is a bomb! Unless it is a bomb and it's specifically made to blow you up, then the mailman can declare martial law as far as anyone cares. With a throw that would shame the great and the possibly late Dunks Watson, Claptrap got the cooler onto the operating table and actually earning a half-hearted thumbs-up from Zed. It looked Zed had opened up another Bandit's chest in order to figure out the grand mystery as to how they produced buzz saws out of nowhere.

Much later, his findings would conclude: They shit them out literally.

Next came a huge stack of paperwork to be given to Marcus. Claptrap overheard Marcus recently figured out a way to bring laser weapons to Pandora, so these papers must be the final touches in completing the deal of the century. Marcus groaned as he got handed the papers. As Claptrap left, he could the hiss of a steam machine starting up. Looks like Marcus still got use out of that old printing press. Either that, or Marcus found dumping it would cost too much. Oh, if only he would compare…buying ink would cost more than getting rid of the machine.

Down to Moxxi's to drop off a fruit basket. No tag on from anyone asking for her hand in marriage. Claptrap usually had to steal another satchel to store all the mail she got. Gifts like this tended to either get eaten, go spoilt, get stolen and ended up being sold by Crazy Earl. This one fruit basket seemingly went ignored…perhaps it had to with the fact that it wasn't a fruit basket, but rather a containment unit for the rare Pandora Bluebird Fruit, a fruit that said to bring good luck to those who either eat parts of it or smell the fragrant stench. Claptrap didn't know this, and gave his usual 'deliver of love' speech to the bored Moxxi before karting off. Moxxi at least hoped that the fruit would bring a end to these annoying messages…

…and the final delivery of the day. The Crimson Raiders fanmail. People wanted to express many, MANY things about the ragtag force that beat Hyperion. Appreciation from the people who were saved by Raiders, requests for support in areas they haven't gotten to, applications to join them, the many and twisted fantasies they had about key members of the Raiders, marriage invitations…still only took half of Claptrap's original satchel. Three raps to the door and in he went to drop off the bag.

"Good morning!" Claptrap gave a hearty introduction. Some members sighed in unison preventing Claptrap from signaling out the people in the crowd and the others just remained quiet. Claptrap went to work of reaching into sack like some sort of robotic Santa Claus and digging out a letter to address to each person to prolong the story and introduce the characters. "Lilith and Maya!" Claptrap chimed up. "You got a letter each from one James Wilson! He's asking for your hands in marriage going by the flowery stationary and the sweet smell of Honey Rose No.6!"

"Oh, sorry." Lilith walked over and snatched the letters out of Claptrap's hand to set it ablaze with her powers, sounding all so-sincere. "If it had been Honey Rose No.7, I would have accepted." Maya nodded in agreement, more interested in her book than the poorly-written letter.

"But Lilith, there has never a Honey Rose following No.6." Claptrap stated. "You see, the factory that made the perfume had been raided by Bandits…"

"Moving on." Lilith muttered with a tone that meant 'do or die, but you might die anyway.' Despite the subtle hint of burning death, Claptrap reached in and pulled out a square box. "To a Mr. Axton, no last name…whatever it is, it's heavy!" Claptrap promptly shook it to hear the sounds of cluttering metal pieces.

"Hey, careful there!" Axton grunted as he had to rescue his mail. "Those are my metal gears I need for my turret! Without them, my baby will be useless on the battlefield!" He held the box like one would protect a baby. "Claptrap, you should know better to mistreat mechanical parts. You need to know to use them."

"Sorry, sorry…" Claptrap profusely apologized before continuing his digging. This time he pulled out a small letter with only the basic details scrawled on. "It's for you Gaige!"

"Gimme, gimee!" The maniac mechromancer demanded as he snatched the letter out of Claptrap's vice grip. "I've been expecting this for too long…" She turned around and started to mutter something to herself. "…and none of you will NEVER read this. Try it and we'll play the mechromancer version of hangman, in which every time I catch one of you guys reading my stuff, I'll replace a limb with a mechanical one." The rest of the Crimson Raiders just ignored her and urged Claptrap with their hands and eyes to continue. "I mean it!" Gaige stressed.

"Next up…" Claptrap pulled out a parcel all tied up with string. "Hey, Brick, package from your mom!"

"YES!" Brick's gleeful cheer made everyone in the room jump up and some even let out surprise. Brick laughed out loud as he took the package and tore it apart to reveal a dogbowl. "It's Priscilla's old dogbowl!" He hugged the memento before going up to his room to place it on his shelf to gaze at every so often and reminisce about all the good times he had with his old dog…until Tiny Tina would snatch it and fill it with gasoline and would use it to coax Brick into letting her join the Slabs as their demoman 'just like in that video game you wouldn't let me play but I do it anyway!'

"Next one is for Mordecai!" Claptrap announced, holding up a small envelope. "Does the 32nd Annual Demeter Sharp Shooting Contest ring any bells?"

"Yeah, yeah." Mordecai got up from feeding Talon and took his envelope. "Another medal." He shrugged before tossing the package over his head and landing it perfectly into the waste bin without hitting the sides on the way in. "Don't need it…" He sighed as he went back to Talon. "…besides, they were terrible shots…"

"Okay…" Claptrap pulled out…a galvanized iron bar bent into a German pretzel. "Krieg?"

"CLASSIC ARTWORK FOR THE MIND AND THE STOMACH!" Krieg jumped down the stairs and snatched the 'art' before swinging on a overhanging bar and throwing himself outside to go and show people his new toy. No need to go any further; outside of one fact. Where did it come from, who made it, when did Krieg re-learn how to order items like a normal person, how did he pay for it when his accounts were frozen following a incident were he bought a entire colony of alpacas and they caused mass hysteria all across Sanctuary; eating food all over, chewing through electric appliances, kicking people over, and ruining the financial infrastructure by doing inside dealings.

"Salvador!" Claptrap piped up after everyone stopped to listen to Kreig's description of the iron pretzel. "Letter from momma!" Salvador made a sound like a junkyard dog giving a fair warning and took the letter for himself. Going into his little corner with a badass stride while flexing his muscles, he quickly zipped into the corner and carefully opened the letter with much glee to learn that his abuela was doing just fine. The second generation Vault Hunters wondered why he bothered hiding this after spending many hours in the wastelands going on about her and the first and 1.5 generation were thinking as to why he didn't just come out.

"Sorry Zer0." Claptrap closed the bag. "I got nothing for you. I was pretty sure I did…but I think it might have been stolen…"

"Oh do not worry,

My mail is perfectly fine,

I stole earlier."

Zer0 held up a postcard he got from an offworld client he helped out many years ago who somehow learned of Zer0's location. Claptrap shrugged and tossed the satchel onto the table so the group can go through their mail on their own time. "Welp, I'm off!" He waved bye, but nobody would wave back. "I got to go back to the office and sort my flamingos…"

Claptrap stopped short, not understanding why he said that. "I meant I got to go to the bathroom and swim in the cleaning kit fluid…no…" Claptrap's arm started to twirl around slowly. The Crimson Raiders took interest now. "What I'm trying to shotgun…no, pistol…SMG…tomahawk…erghagh…" Claptrap's arms started to twirl around even faster now, and his eye started to flash a bright blue. "…funny episode of Family Guy…absolutely not!" Claptrap groaned as his entire body started to shake. "Guys, do you ever feel like you're slowly loosing your mind and then you explode…"

With a loud hiss and bang, Claptrap's arms shot out and were firmly embedded into the ceiling and his chassis shot up from his wheel and crashed right behind him. The Crimson Raiders ducked behind furniture to avoid any other shrapnel coming from the completely defective Claptrap. While still alive, he was in need of serious repairs to both hardware and software.

In the weather, unusual black clouds started to move in toward Sanctuary. They didn't appear to be carrying rain going by how the land underneath the clouds weren't drenched in acidic liquid, but the clouds did bring a bad omen…


	2. We Can Try To Repair Him

"A3 connects to B3…"

"Yah sure? Maybe it's B3 that connects into A3…"

"Does it matter?"

"It sure does! You can't stick a turkey through a closed oven door!"

"I think I understand your hick metaphor. Let's just try it and see what happens…"

Scooter grunted as he shoved the B3 rod into A3 slot. A dull click meant that it fit and would stick in. Gaige did the same for the other arm. Moxxi staid by the sidelines to keep looking for any Claptrap blueprints on the EchoNet. The rest of the Crimson Raiders just waited by as the only mechanics tried to repair the last Claptrap in existence.

"I wonder what happened to all those repair kits we used?" Brick wondered out loud. "Pretty sure we can find one nearby…" He started to tap on his Echo device to start the quest. "Weird, I ain't finding the location on the map…and there's no quest to go find a repair kit…"

"That's because Jack had them all destroyed." Maya filled Brick in. "Following his rise to the CEO position, one of his first orders were to destroy all Claptrap and anything related to them. That includes the repair kits, the factories, the small-time businesses that offered Claptrap repairs, the bobbleheads, the car accessories, and even those delicious mints." Maya sighed. "The only Claptrap things that still exist are this poor guy and the junk art made out of dead Claptraps."

"Amazing how this one Claptrap survived everything…" Mordecai admitted, raising a hand to his chin.

"As annoying as this unit is, he has endured a lot." Athena started before listing off: "He has went through multiple bandit attacks, being reconfigured into the Interplanetary Ninja Assassin, being in the middle of a exploding tank, shot up again and forced back into becoming a regular Claptrap, kidnapped by Jack and reworked into the Fragtrap, survived a crash landing in space, shot out of a moonshot cannon, became a circuit breaker, suffered through the same things that all Vault Hunters went through on a daily basis, became infected with a brain-eating worm, nearly got destroyed by a singularity, being torn up by Jack and launched back to Pandora, returned to being the only Claptrap in existence while being stranded in a frozen wasteland with corpses of his fallen race for company, routinely tortured by bandits, had his eye torn out by a bullymong, electrocuted by a fence, blown up a cannon, nearly getting destroyed by Hyperion forces, causing another crash landing, nearly got torn apart by natives…I might be missing a few things, but I believe I've covered the major details."

"Where did you learn all that?" Lilith had to ask, still suspicious of the former assassin.

"I was present for most of the troubles this Claptrap went through, the rest I found by watching surveillance tapes or reading about them on EchoNet blogs…like yours." She pointed a finger and moved it around the room, pointing to each Vault Hunter around. "Gaige's blog is the more informative one I must admit. While possessing a unusual form of grammar and spelling that relies on numbers in place of letters, she does include the most details."

"Hey, it's what I do." Gaige shrugged as she shoved in Claptrap's arm.

"How's the scrapbag coming along?" Marcus came in with a huff. "I'm not interested in Claptrap's well-being, but I'm interested in using him to deliver packages to some…customers down east."

"Well…" Scooter wiped off a smudge of oil on his brow; or rather smudge it in even more. "Here I thought Claptraps were made out of junk. But no, these suckers need spe-ecific parts to run all their systems! Whoever thought this would work must be whacked-out on the drugs or something!"

"The designer was working on the personality problem when he died." Athena brought up. "And I remember finding a record about Jack having problems reworking Claptrap into Fragtrap. Those repair kits that the original generation Vault Hunters kept finding were just the only way to repair these walking junk piles."

"Oh." Brick blinked. "So, vending machine, fridge, nightstand?"

"What?" Everyone collectively asked, turning a raised eyebrow at Brick.

"For Claptrap once he's dead." Brick shrugged sheepishly. "Hey, waste not…"

"We can repair him!" Gaige shouted as she shoved some wires. "We're going to need a little help tho'. Hey, Zer0! Get me into contact with Doc Alpha, would ya?" The assassin nodded and tapped a few things on a nearby console. A few blips and beeps later and on the screen came a human male with short black hair, rectangle glasses and a rather annoyed look on his face. "Sorry for waking you up Doc, but I need you to look at this machine…"

"…of course." Alpha groaned. "You wake me up so I can help you repair a Claptrap." Alpha sighed and placed a hand over his face. "Well, at least I can add to my resume that I repaired the last Claptrap in existence." A few keyboard taps were heard over on his end and out from the console came a few wires that went into Claptrap and went work doing whatever wires that magically came out of a computer…magic science you could say. "Geez, that modem went out of style and usage years ago! I knew Claptraps were junk, but still…"

"Whose this guy?" Brick asked, wondering about the new guy that hadn't mentioned before until now.

"Only of the greatest minds of our century!" Gaige gasped, sounding all offended. "This guy can turn a pile of scrap metal into a killer robot! A heap of wires into a computer capable of outracing most modern-day comps! If he can't fix Claptrap…I'm pretty sure he can make Claptrap into something usable." She sighed as she tried to keep up with the magic wires working inside of the comatose Claptrap.

"I'm not that special." Alpha sighed. "Just a guy trapped in a high-tech lab armed with constantly-evolving technology."

"Pretty sure he's also a huge geek." Gaige added as she turned her head over to look at the monitor tracking Claptrap's 'vitals'. Whatever Alpha was doing with his wires started to bring Claptrap back to life. The bored-looking magician of mechanics suddenly seemed invested as he too looked over to a different monitor on his end. He grumbled something as he looked away from the operation and scooted his chair over to a few computers to type something in. Everyone went quiet as the tests continue to run, the only sound in the air were that of running machines.

But don't worry. All the silence got filled up soon. "Annddd…reboot! Man, I felt like a brick got jammed inside of my body and got removed by taking a pickaxe to it! Holy cow, did that HURT! Hey, how did I get here anyway? Did I get launched through out of cannon again and land into a wall? I don't recall signing any waver! Wait, unless I was used as ammo by bandits again…did bandits attack Sanctuary? Or was it Hyperion? Another company? Atlas' Revenge? Some sort of crossover with some serious series or a series that haven't had a entry in years? Is everyone okay? Did my house survive?"

"QUIET!" Alpha shouted, making everyone jump. "Look, welcome back to the world of the living." Alpha continued to type away at his computer before looking back to the view screen. "But while I was working on your repairs, I ran a few diagnoses on your systems. All of your parts are outdated, your modem is struggling to keep up…I pulled a few bypasses so you won't suddenly explode or shut-down again…but…" He sighed.

"Oh great." Claptrap sighed, or at least the robotic version of a sigh. He flipped himself off the table and rolled back and forth. "Give to me straight Doc. How terminal am I?"

"Let me show you." A few more types on a keyboard, and Claptrap's eye projected a red holographic screen showing a countdown. It started with three-hundred and sixty hours before ticking down the seconds. Everyone in the room looked at it for a good minute before Alpha pitched in with a rather damning explanation.

"Claptrap, within fifteen days, just a day over two weeks, your servos will lock up permanently. You will become irreparable. Effectively…you will die."


End file.
